I'm pleased to announce the release of El Dorado version 0.9.2 - the "group chat" edition. You can download it right away, or check out the demo, testing, and support site here:
http://eldorado.heroku.com/
Since we last spoke at the end of January, there's been a goodly amount of activity with El Dorado. The highlight, of course, is the new group chat feature:
This is a very simple and lightweight implementation that's perfect for small groups. It works solely with the tools provided by Rails and doesn't add anything to the overall requirements for running El Dorado. I've been using it with my group of friends for a few weeks now, and it's been working great. I'm sure that I'll have some more features to announce with the next release, but my favorite little touch so far is the "who's in the chat room and when was the chat last active" indicator on the home page:
In addition to the addition of group chat, there have been a number of improvements to other parts of the app and quite a bit of back-end optimization/refactoring. Here's a quick list of the new features:

Make entire site private with a simple admin setting (great for small companies)

Of course, you can follow along with all of the activity in El Dorado on the commit log at github. You see, being the lemming that I am, I've followed Rails to github and Lighthouse already. I haven't had time to settle into Lighthouse just yet, but I've been having a blast with git and github.
In fact, I gave a presentation at Chicago Ruby and spent a fair amount of time talking about making the move to git. Definitely flip through the PDF to learn all about the origin of El Dorado (where the name came from, etc) but take my word for it about one thing: git/github is the way to go:
If you believe the PDF, then the upcoming of releases should go something like this:

Chat

Localization (see note below)

Blog

Themes

Photos

Wiki

Polls

Link Sharing

Mobile Messaging

Thanks to git/github, jxl has been working on a localized version of El Dorado using Gibberish, and he's already completed a Dutch translation. I'll be working with him to pull his changes into my repo for the next release. If you're interested in translating El Dorado into another language, please do get in touch!
I think that about covers it... so... Welcome to El Dorado v.0.9.2!
Learn more and/or download El Dorado here: http://almosteffortless.com/eldorado/